Flip through the latest issue of Gulf Weekly.
Students exploring the night sky, looking to the moon and tackling climate change challenges won the top awards at the fifth-ever Nasa Space Apps hackathon.
The two-day event took place on October 1 and 2 at the Bahrain Polytechnic and was organised in collaboration between the university, the National Space Science Agency and the Bahrain Society for Engineers.
Team ‘The Apollos’, took on the ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’ challenge, developing a learning tool to teach people about stellar variability and help them understand how dynamic the night sky is and was awarded the Best Use of Technology.
“We created an interactive educational game using Python to encourage people to really consider and learn more about the night sky we see in Bahrain,” team member Fatema Al Meamari, a student at the West Riffa Secondary Girls School told GulfWeekly.
The team was also comprised of Nora Ghulam Haider and Hadeel Nasraldeen Mohamed, also from West Riffa Secondary Girls School, as well as Retaj Aljuma, Fajer Ahmed Aljamal and Fajer Adnan Ahmed from AlMabarrah AlKhalifia Foundation.
Meanwhile, Team ‘Orbitals’ took on the ‘Make a Moonquake Map’ challenge, creating an application that plots data collected by lunar geophysical instruments and won the Best Use of Data.
Twins Erik and Aline Poulsen were joined by Ghazlan Qadeer and Zahra Nema, all from Hawar International School, as they created a seismic map of the lunar surface.
“This was a unique opportunity and we really enjoyed coming up with a solution for this challenge,” Aline added.
Students were given less than 48 hours to come up with solutions to one of the 22 challenges posed by the National Aeronautical Space Agency (Nasa), including a free-for-all that gave enterprising students an opportunity to develop their own challenge.
The Local Impact award was won by Team ‘Smoke Screen’ for breaking down how climate change was affecting day-to-day life in Bahrain.
The team also came up with actionable solutions for climate challenges faced by the kingdom.
“One of the solutions we came up with is Direct Air Capture (DAC) which removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, storing it in deep geological formations,” Bahrain Polytechnic student Husain Basem Hasan added.
“We also developed a mini balloon game to encourage people to learn more about climate change.”
Abdulrahman Khaled Salah (University of Bahrain), Maryam Mohamed Khalil (Bahrain Polytechnic), Sara Jaffar Isa Jawad (Bahrain Polytechnic), Sarah Khalid Almurbati (Bahrain Polytechnic) and Fatima AlMalki (Shaika Hessa Girls School) were also part of Team ‘Smoke Screen’.
The competition was judged by Dr. Mohamed Aljerjawi from Bahrain Polytechnic as well as Heyam Al Maskati, Yusuf Al Ameen and Mohamed Al Asfoor from the Bahrain Society of Engineers, who grilled participants after their five-minute presentations.
For more details and to learn more about upcoming educational initiatives, follow @nssa_bh on Instagram.
